Feed my lamb Community School

Feed my lamb community school aims to offer holistic education to children, combining their academic education with learning a variety of vocational/practical skills that can be used as a means to support themselves and their families in future. Ultimately, we believe this will allow every child to reach his or her full potential in various academic and life skills.

The current model of education in Uganda as well as our community see many students leave school without any practical skills to use in their adult lives as way of supporting themselves and their families in the future. This has accelerated the levels of poverty because without any hands on practical, vocational skills these girls and boys will always depend on their families, who also have little means of getting an income to support everyone.

At Feed my Lamb community school, we give a more meaningful education that integrates conventional vocational school, placing equal importance on both academic and vocational skills. We intend to create a place where students and parents will be encouraged to interact during the community based project trainings. In this way, we will be providing an environment where students, parents and elder members of the community will be able to learn from each other.

The school project fits right in FML’s mission, which is “To have a skilled motivated society that is innovative enough to sustain themselves.” By tapping into individual interests, talents and capacities, Feed My Lamb creates an empowering environment whereby people freely gather a variety of knowledge and skills for self-reliance and development.

Currently, our primary school, which started in 2017 offers an integrated curriculum that combines the usual academic subjects available at other primary schools with vocational skills training. We offer practical skills training in tailoring, knitting, baking, sports, music, dance and drama, computer, mechanical repairing, on-farm agricultural skills, woodwork, metal fabrication and others, side by side with academic subjects like mathematics, English, science etc. The school also encourages students to learn from, and with, their parents and elders of the community. These adults are welcomed into the school, where an open and shared learning style is nurtured.

Since we lack enough trainers and facilities now, we always call in community members to volunteer in the training and we expose the children to different hands-on training avenues around the community.

After a community member donated the land for the school site during 2015 and an architectural plan developed, fund-raising quickly got underway by our sponsors World Development Group. By mid May 2016, we were thrilled to see construction getting started. Seven classrooms, offices, a water tank, kitchen block and a pit biogas-latrine block were constructed as part of Phase1 and the first primary school students started classes in February 2017.

As part of Phase 2, we would like to construct the workshop block, which will enable vocational subjects to be taught in this purpose built structure as from the beginning of 2018. What an exciting time ahead! To support the project and keep up with everything as the school progress, please keep visiting our website and Facebook page.

How You Can Help
With our amazing philanthropic donors, enabling us build the structures for the primary school; we still need a lot of help and support. FML’s plan is to set up a Secondary and Vocational College that will work as a demonstration Centre in providing meaningful education to the rest of the schools in the District and Uganda as a country. We strongly believe that conventional academic education can be integrated with vocational skills training, a component that is largely missing in many schools around the country and Kabarole District in particular.

We also need to support teachers. An average teacher’s wage in Uganda is $200 per month. By getting some of your family, friends, work colleagues or schoolmates together, you can cover FML community schoolteachers wage for less than you think. Perhaps your school or workplace would like to hold event/s to raise the annual amount required, or simply join together to donate on a regular basis.